For quite some time now, I’ve been harbouring an increasing bit of frustration with ASP.NET. Overall, I like the platform, and I think that it’s a great advance over ASP.OLD. Unfortunately, there are a few areas in which I can’t help but feel that the design team missed the boat by just a wee bit too much, and compensating for these lacunae can mean a ridiculous amount of work for the individual developer.

There are three main areas that have been grating on my nerves of late:

1. User input validation
2. HTML encoding
3. Culture usage

I’d love to see the ASP.NET team address fundamentals like these in upcoming versions, but new features generally garner considerably more interest amongst users than fixing things that very few people ever realized were broken. In an attempt to perhaps rouse a bit of interest in the latter, I’m starting a short series of posts on the above topics, starting with What’s wrong with ASP.NET? Validation.